Lang.NEXT Keynote: What -- If Anything -- Have We Learned from C++? -- Bjarne Stroustrup

By Blog Staff | Jun 3, 2014 05:28 AM | Tags: None

Hot off the Channel 9 video press from last week's Lang.NEXT conference:

Lang.NEXT Keynote: What – if anything – have we learned from C++?

by Bjarne Stroustrup

What is the essence of C++? Why did it succeed despite its well-understood flaws? What lessons -- if any -- can be applied to newer languages?

Themes: Social and technical factors. Resource management. Generic programming. The importance of being inefficient. The importance of syntax. How (not) to specify a language. Standardization and compatibility. And no, I don't plan to condemn C++ -- it is still the best language around for a lot of things, and getting better. It just isn't anywhere near perfect (even of its kind) or the best at everything -- and was never claimed to be.

CppCon Program Preview, 2 of N -- Boris Kolpackov

By Blog Staff | Jun 2, 2014 08:40 AM | Tags: None

More CppCon 2014 accepted talks have just been announced, below. For past announcements about the conference program, see also CppCon Program Preview, 1 of N and CppCon 2104: Initial Partial Topics and Speakers.

Super Early Bird registration has sold out, but Early Bird registration is available until June 30.

CppCon Program Preview, 2 of N

by Boris Kolpackov

From the announcement:

Continuing with the program preview, the next set of accepted talks is below (summary first, abstracts following):

• Andrei Alexandrescu: “Mo’ Hustle Mo’ Problems”
• Andrew Sutton: “Generic Programming with Concepts Lite”
• Marshall Clow: “Hardening Your Code”
• Nate Kohl: “cppreference.com: Documenting C++ One Edit at a Time”
• Kate Gregory, James McNellis: “Modernizing Legacy C++ Code”

Andrei Alexandrescu: “Mo’ Hustle Mo’ Problems"

Reasonably-written C++ code will be naturally fast. This is due to C++’s excellent low-penalty abstractions and a memory model close to the machine. However, a large category of applications have no boundaries on desired speed, meaning there’s no point of diminishing returns in making code faster. Better speed means less power consumed for the same work, more workload with the same data center expense, better features for the end user, more features for machine learning, better analytics, and more. Optimizing has always been an art, and in particular optimizing C++ on contemporary hardware has become a task of formidable complexity. This is because modern hardware has a few peculiarities about it that are not sufficiently understood and explored. This talk discusses a few such effects, and guides the attendee on how to navigate design and implementation options in search for better performance.

Speaker’s bio: Andrei Alexandrescu is a researcher, software engineer, and author. He wrote three best-selling books on programming (Modern C++ Design, C++ Coding Standards, and The D Programming Language) and numerous articles and papers on wide-ranging topics from programming to language design to Machine Learning to Natural Language Processing. Andrei holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BS in Electrical Engineering from University “Politehnica” Bucharest. He works as a Research Scientist for Facebook.

Andrew Sutton: “Generic Programming with Concepts Lite"

In this talk, I will give an overview of the Concepts Lite language extension for C++ and present examples of its use in design and implementation of real-world generic libraries. Concepts Lite provides the ability for programmers to directly state constraints on template arguments as part of the template declaration. These constraints are predicates which determine whether or not a template argument can be used with that template. Constraints are checked by the compiler at the point of use, meaning that that effectively constrained generic libraries will not suffer from the usual problems of insane diagnostics. Libraries written using concepts will be far more readable and maintainable than the status quo. This talk will focus on generic programming, proposed language features, and their use in building real-world libraries. Concepts Lite is a forthcoming ISO Technical Specification (TS) aimed at publication alongside C++14. Concepts Lite is implemented in a branch of GCC, which will be made available to the audience for experiments and experience.

Speaker’s bio: Andrew Sutton is an assistant professor at the University of Akron in Ohio where he teaches and conducts research at the intersection of Software Engineering and Programming Languages. Dr. Sutton helped design and implemented the Concepts Lite proposal for the C++ programming language. He is also the author of the Origin C++ Libraries, an experimental collection of generic libraries that supports ideas and research for generic programming. Dr. Sutton had previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University where he worked with Bjarne Stroustrup and Gabriel Dos Reis on the design and implementation of language support for generic programming (i.e., Concepts Lite). He is a member of the C++ Standards Committee and Project Editor for the Concepts Lite Technical Specification. He graduated with a PhD in computer science from Kent State University in Ohio in 2010.

Marshall Clow: “Hardening Your Code"

Ok, you’ve written some code, and it seems to work. How can you be sure that it works? It’s a busy, complicated, dangerous world out there, and software has to work in lots of different environments. How can you gain confidence about your code? How can you make your code more reliable? There are a lot of techniques available to developers today; I’ll talk about several of them: Unit tests, static analysis, runtime analysis, fuzzing, decoding compiler warnings and probably others.

Speaker’s bio: Marshall is a long-time Boost participant. He is one of the moderators of the Boost-Users mailing list, and helps keep the Trac system running. Marshall is a principal engineer at Qualcomm, Inc. in San Diego. He is the author of the Boost.Algorithm library, maintains Boost.Array and Boost.StringAlgo, and is the leader of the Boost Community Maintenance team.

Nate Kohl: “cppreference.com: Documenting C++ One Edit at a Time"

How do you convert hundreds of pages of C++ standardese into a resource that is accessible to software engineers around the world? This talk will describe the process of building a community-run website that documents all of the nooks and dark corners of the C++ programming language. I’ll look back at the history of how C++ was defined, cover the current state of documentation, examine the pros and cons of running a fairly high-profile publicly-editable wiki, and try to guess at what the future holds.

Speaker’s bio: Nate Kohl is a software engineer at Google who enjoys herding cats.

Kate Gregory, James McNellis: “Modernizing Legacy C++ Code"

C++ is a programming language with a long, storied history spanning over three decades–four if one includes its C ancestry. The C++ language has undergone many changes during that time, compiler technology has advanced substantially, and computers today are very different from the computers of decades past. But despite all of these advances, there’s an awful lot of C++ code in use today that looks like it was written in the 1980s. In C++ some cases, the code was written in the 1980s and it’s still in use; in other cases, it’s recently-written code that just doesn’t use modern style. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the problems with legacy code, and review some practical techniques for applying principles of modern C++ to gradually improve the quality of legacy code and improve maintainability and debuggability. We’ll show how some very small changes to code can yield huge benefits.

Speakers’ bio: Kate Gregory has been using C++ since before Microsoft had a C++ compiler. She writes, mentors, codes, and leads projects, in both C++ and .NET, especially for Windows 7 and 8. Kate is a Microsoft Regional Director, a Visual C++ MVP, and has written over a dozen books (the most recent on C++ AMP for Microsoft Press) and speaks at conferences and user groups around the world. Kate develops courses on C++, Visual Studio, and Windows programming for Pluralsight, founded the East of Toronto .NET Users group, and is a member of adjunct faculty at Trent University in Peterborough.

James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog.

CppCon Program Preview, 1 of N -- Boris Kolpackov

By Blog Staff | May 29, 2014 08:38 AM | Tags: None

The countdown continues: Today we are exactly 100 days out from CppCon 2014.

This morning, the organizers announced that CppCon will have some 100 talks, which going by the size of the program likely makes this the biggest C++ event in... ever. Also, we now have the first set of accepted talks.

CppCon Program Preview, 1 of N

by Boris Kolpackov

From the announcement:

Good news: Due to the large number of submissions (we got over 140), the conference will have 6 tracks instead of the planned 5. This means there will be approximately 100 talks, and that’s not counting keynotes, plenary sessions, and lightning talks (more on those soon). As far as we know no other conference has ever had this number of C++-related presentations which will make CppCon 2014 the biggest event in the history of the language.

Understandably, many of you would like to see the conference program before registering. However, due to a greater than expected number of submissions, the final program is still some weeks away. So to help you make up your mind (or convince your boss) we are going to start publishing the talks as they are accepted. So here is the first chunk (summary first, abstracts following):

Scott Meyers: “Type Deduction and Why You Care”

John JT Thomas: “Embarcadero Case Study: Bringing CLANG/LLVM to Windows”

Rachel Cheng, Michael VanLoon: “Boost: A Bridge from C++98 to C++11; An Introduction to Using More Boost”

Titus Winters: “The Philosophy of Google’s C++ Code”

James McNellis: “Unicode in C++”

 

Scott Meyers: "Type Deduction and Why You Care"

C++98 had template type deduction, and it worked so intuitively, there was little need to understand what took place under the covers. C++11 extends type deduction to include universal references, applies it to auto variables and lambda expressions, then throws in a special auto-only deduction rule. C++14 pushes the boundary further, adding two forms of function return type deduction (auto and decltype(auto)) for arbitrary functions and offering auto parameters for lambdas. The result is that what could be treated as a black box in C++98 has become a topic that practicing C++ developers really need to understand. This talk will give you the information you need to do that.

Speaker’s bio: Scott Meyers is one of the world’s foremost experts on C++ software development. He wrote the best-selling Effective C++ series (Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL) and is also author of Overview of the New C++ (C++11/14) and Effective C++ in an Embedded Environment.

John JT Thomas: "Embarcadero Case Study: Bringing CLANG/LLVM to Windows"

CLANG/LLVM delivers a highly conforming C++ compiler and architecture for targeting multiple CPUs, and, as such, has seen success in iOS and other operating systems. Embarcadero has successfully delivered the first commercial compiler for Windows based on CLANG/LLVM. This session describes the benefits of CLANG/LLVM as well as the challenges in bringing it to the Windows operating system. Particular emphasis is placed on the managing the changes in CLANG as well as the additional features added to enable Windows development.

Speaker’s bio: John “JT” Thomas, Director of Product Management at Embarcadero Technologies, has more than 15 years of product management and product development experience including hands-on experience with the early versions of Delphi and C++Builder at Borland Software. While at Borland he was a delegate on the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee. He earned his Computer Science degree from University of California, Santa Cruz and his MBA and MSE from San Jose State University.

Rachel Cheng and Michael VanLoon: "Boost: A Bridge from C++98 to C++11; An Introduction to Using More Boost"

Part one is for those who are stuck with a C++98/03 compiler, but are interested in using more advanced C++11-like strategies. We will discuss some of the differences between C++98 and C++11 while demonstrating how strategic use of Boost libraries can bridge the gap, allowing more modern programming paradigms in many cases.  Part two is a deeper dive into some interesting Boost libraries for those who may be new to Boost usage. We will explore how C++98 and C++11 can be enhanced and extended by the additional richness of Boost libraries. We will use as example some of the boost libraries used in the F5 Networks code base. If there is time leftover, we will discuss our experience upgrading GCC.

Speakers’ bio: Rachel Cheng is a recent graduate from The Evergreen State College is currently employed at F5 Networks. Michael VanLoon is a Senior Software Engineer at F5 Networks, is a member of the Northwest C++ Users group, and has attended ISO C++ Standards Committee meetings. He has benefited from time at Microsoft, Yahoo!, and VMware, among others, before joining F5. He is fascinated with crafting code and is dismayed at code that falls short of its potential.

Titus Winters: "The Philosophy of Google’s C++ Code"

The Google C++ Style Guide is a fairly popular guide for C++ coding practices, both at Google and externally, but some of its recommendations often seem dated and have created controversy and perceived tension with more modern C++ In this talk we will focus on the core philosophies underlying that guide, ranging from the common (be consistent) to the unusual (leave an explicit trace for the reader), and debunk the idea that Google’s C++ is anything less than modern. We’ll discuss how these core ideas inform contentious rules like “No non-const references” and “Don’t use exceptions,” and how the application of those rules has worked for us in practice, both as developers and reliability engineers (SREs).

Speaker’s bio: Titus Winters has spent the past three years working on Google’s core C++ libraries. He’s particularly interested in issues of large scale software engineering and codebase maintenance: How do we keep a codebase of over 100M lines of code consistent and flexible for the next decade? Along the way he has helped Google teams pioneer techniques to perform automated code transformations on a massive scale, and helps maintain the Google C++ Style Guide.

James McNellis: "Unicode in C++"

In some programming languages, text processing is easy. Unfortunately, C++ is not one of those languages. C++ lacks good, built-in support for Unicode, though the situation is starting to improve. This session will begin with a brief overview of text encodings, and an introduction to Unicode and the various Unicode encodings. We’ll look at the woeful state of Unicode support in C++98 (or, really, lack thereof), then take a look at the improvements that were made in C++11 and other improvements that have recently been proposed for standardization. We’ll finish up with a discussion of several libraries designed to make it easier to work with Unicode in C++, including the widely-used, open-source International Components for Unicode (ICU) library.

Speaker’s bio: James McNellis is a senior engineer on the Microsoft Visual C++ team, where he is responsible for the Visual C++ C Runtime (CRT) and C Standard Library implementation. He was previously a member of the Microsoft Expression Blend team, developing the XAML designer tools for Windows 8 apps. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2010, he spent several years working on real-time 3-D simulation and robotics projects in the defense industry. James is a prolific contributor on the Stack Overflow programming Q&A website and occasionally writes for the Visual C++ Team Blog.
 

Writing min function, part 1: The rise of Concepts -- Fernando Pelliccioni

By Fernando Pelliccioni | May 28, 2014 07:32 PM | Tags: intermediate

[Ed: Note that this article series is not (yet) about C++ code, but it promises to go there and it has an interesting pedigree in its generic programming design analysis (Alex Stepanov) and reviewers (several ISO C++ participants including Andrzej Krzemienski and Dean Michael Berris.]

Writing min function, part 1: The rise of Concepts

by Fernando Pelliccioni

From the article:

This is the first in a series of articles in which I want to transmit what I learned (or what I think I learned) from the books, papers, lectures of Alexander Stepanov.

These are the lessons that Alex gives us, and I want to show them in this series:

• Specify our algorithms correctly
• Programming must be based on a solid mathematical foundation
• Designing our API’s consistently
• Not always the library implementations provided by the programming languages we use are correct, even though they are designed by “experts”.
• The concept of Stability
• Generic programming, of course!

Ref-qualified member functions -- Alexander Kulikov

By Blog Staff | May 28, 2014 07:23 PM | Tags: intermediate basics

Today on Kukuruku:

Ref-qualified member functions

by Alexander Kulikov

From the article:

Today I’m going to tell you about a new and a little known (to my mind) C++ feature — reference-qualified member functions. I’ll tell about the rules of such functions overloading and, as an example of use, I’ll show you that with the help of ref-qualified you can try to improve the resource management scheme, which is implemented with the help of another C++ idiom — RAII.

How Dropbox Uses C++ for Cross-Platform iOS and Android Development -- Ole Begemann

By Blog Staff | May 27, 2014 08:37 AM | Tags: None

Did you know that C++ is a hot language for mobile development? This seems to be widely known among C++ developers, but surprisingly widely unknown in the non-C++ programming community at large. Two of the major reasons why C++ is currently experiencing this surge in mobile interest are:

• C++'s efficiency and determinism help create power-sipping apps -- ones that not only use fewer CPU cycles, but use them in battery-friendly "bursty" ways that let the CPU sleep frequently, and deterministically let go of expensive resources like sensors immediately when they're not needed.
• C++'s portability makes it the only cross-platform language that can target every major and minor mobile phone and tablet platform -- including iOS, Android, Windows and Windows Phone, and Blackberry -- never mind of course as usual also targeting every other platform and environment too, from desktops to servers to datacenters where it's already the language of choice in companies from Google to Facebook.

In that vein, here's a post from just before the U.S. long weekend about using C++ for cross-platform mobile development.

Expect to see more news like this. Also, expect to see talks on using C++ for modern cross-platform mobile development as one of the hot topics at CppCon this September.

How Dropbox Uses C++ for Cross-Platform iOS and Android Development

by Ole Begemann

From the article:

When work started on the Mailbox app for Android, the team made the choice to write a large portion of the non-UI code in C++ — rather than rewriting the entire app in Java — with the goal of sharing that common C++ layer between iOS and Android. The iOS app used Core Data at the time, so migrating it off of Core Data to the shared C++ library was also part of the process. C++ seemed like an obvious choice because it is available on every platform and team members preferred the language over Java.

The Carousel team made the same choice since launching simultaneously on iOS and Android was an important goal from the start.

Quick Q: Why can't a data member be in a lamba capture list -- StackOverflow

By Blog Staff | May 22, 2014 12:01 PM | Tags: basics

Quick A: Because you can only capture local (stack) objects, including function parameters, and to access a data member in a member function you capture the local variable this.

Today on SO:

Why can't a data member be in a lamba capture list

I have a class foo that has bar as a member variable.

In another member function of the class, I'm writing a lambda function:

[bar](void){}

But I can't include bar in the capture list. Why is that?

C++Now 2014 talk slides now available

By Blog Staff | May 22, 2014 09:06 AM | Tags: None

Many of the slides from last week's sold-out C++Now event are now posted on GitHub at the link below, and more are still being added.

If you missed C++Now this year, head over to check out the new CppCon coming this September...

C++Now 2014 Presentations

Tuesday, May 13

Library in a Week - c++ templating engine

Keynote: Axiomatic Programming: From Euclidean Deductions to C++ Templates and Beyond

C++14: Through the Looking Glass

Coroutines, Fibers, and Threads, Oh My

The Canonical Class

ConceptClang: Theoretical Advances with Full C++ Concepts

Generic Programming of Generic Spaces: Compile-Time Geometric Algebra with C++11

Test-Driven Development With Boost.Test and Turtle Mock, Part I/II

Removing undefined behavior from integer operations: the bounded::integer library

Value Semantics and Range Algorithms - Composability and Efficiency

Preparing the C++11 Library AFIO for Boost Peer Review

Wednesday, May 14

MPL11: A New Metaprogramming Library for C++11

The Optimization of a Boost.Asio-Based Networking Server

Undefined Behavior in C++; what is it, and why should I care

Mach7: The Design and Evolution of a Pattern Matching Library for C++

Practical Type Erasure: A boost::any Based Configuration Framework

A Tutorial Introduction to C++11/14 Part I/II

C++11 in Space Plasma Model Development

C++11 Library Design

Goals for Better Code: Implement Complete Types

Multiplatform C++

Octopus: A Policy-Driven Framework for CFD Simulations

Thursday, May 15

Keynote: Beware of C++

Interactive Metaprogramming Shell Based on Clang

libcppa: Type-safe Messaging Systems in C++

Unicode in C++

CppComponents: A Modern Portable C++11 Component System

UI. Aesthetics. C++

Accelerator Programming with C++ AMP

Designing XML API for Modern C++

Modern C++ as Concurrent Assembly

Understanding &&

Boost Library Incubator | Zip Archive

Friday, May 16

Iterators May Stay | LibreOffice File

Value Semantics: It ain't about the syntax!

Create Your Own Refactoring Tool with Clang

How to Design C++ Implementations of Complex Combinatorial Algorithms

Intro to Functional Programming in C++

Managing Object Lifetimes

0xBADC0DE

Expected — An Exception-friendly Error Monad

Lifetime and Usage of Global, Thread-local, and Static Data

Functional Data Structures in C++

Asynchronous Programming Using Boost.MetaStateMachine and the Upcoming Asynchronous Library

Ownership of Memory in C++

Saturday, May 17

The Future of Accelerator Programming in C++

Functional Reactive Programming - Cleanly Abstracted Interactivity

Disambiguation: The Black Technology

My Thoughts on Large Code Base Change Ripple Management in C++

Future of Boost: Boostache

Future of Boost: Community Management Team

Vector of Objects vs Vector of Pointers Updated -- Bartlomiej Filipek

By Blog Staff | May 22, 2014 07:30 AM | Tags: performance memory intermediate efficiency

More in the "contiguous enables fast" department:

Vector of Objects vs Vector of Pointers Updated

by Bartlomiej Filipek

From the article:

For 1000 particles we need on the average 2000 cache line reads! This is 78% more cache line reads than the first case! Additionally Hardware Prefetcher cannot figure out the pattern -- it is random -- so there will be a lot of cache misses and stalls.

In our experiment the pointer code for 80k of particles was more 266% slower than the continuous case.

ACCU 2014 talk slides now available

By Blog Staff | May 21, 2014 02:58 PM | Tags: intermediate

[Ed: Here's a candidate for the most hilarious thing you'll probably see today: Kevlin Henney's slide deck, including a link to this @netbat tweet.]

The recent ACCU 2014 was another resounding success, and many of the talk slides have now been posted. You can find them here:

Slides, Photos, Blogs via #accu2014 (accu.org)

Some fun C++ highlights with slides available include:

• Dietmar Kuhl · Performance Choices
• Howard Hinnant · Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Move Semantics (and then some)
• Hubert Matthews · Where is C++ headed?
• Jonathan Wakely · There Ain't No Such Thing As A Universal Reference
• Jonathan Wakely · The C++14 Standard Library
• Kevlin Henney · Immutabilty FTW!
• Marshall Clow · C++ Undefined Behavior -- what is it, and why should I care?
• Olve Maudal · C++ Pub Quiz
• Pattabi Raman · Random number generation in C++ -- present and potential future
• Peter Sommerlad · C++14 an overview on the new standard for C++(11) programmers
• Steve Love · Range and Elevation -- C++ in a modern world
• ... and more (see the page).